Online Certificate in Scaling a Business: How to Build a Unicorn

Key Takeaways

Wharton’s Scaling a Business: How to Build a Unicorn program explores the concept of unicorns, from what they look like and how they prepare for growth to how they deal with failure and crises along the way. This program will enable you to:

• Identify the characteristics of unicorn organizations
• Design a well-structured business experiment
• Analyze organizational resources and constraints to scale technology
• Examine the processes and structure of a growing organization
• Examine effective frameworks and metrics of an organization’s readiness to scale
• Evaluate the personnel and cultural needs within an organization

Program Modules

Module 1: Characteristics of a Unicorn — Yes, They Are Real

Begin by gaining a broad understanding of the program’s key concepts: the main characteristics of unicorns, myths of unicorns, growth limiters, and common mistakes.

Module 2: Experimentation: Scaling the Organization

Learn how small companies can succeed even without all the resources large organizations have, and examine the latest research on conducting business experiments, how to make them successful, and how you can use them to continue to grow your organization to unicorn status.

Module 3: Scaling Technology and Operational Resources

Discover the ways you can prepare to invest in the right operational and technological resources, including how to move from short-term to long-term considerations and how to think about modeling uncertainty.

Module 4: Scaling Processes and Structure

Understand what problems processes solve and learn the advantages and disadvantages of formalizing processes. Then create a road map to identify and design processes that scale.

Module 5: Metrics and Financials

Explore the framework for determining your organization’s readiness and ability to scale, as well as the metrics necessary before and after scaling to ensure that expansion is successful and sustainable.

Module 6: Scaling Culture: Rewards, Hiring, Incentives, and Interviewing

When the time comes to scale, many companies realize internal factors are slowing their scaling process. Delve into scaling internally by focusing on your organization’s culture and people.

Industry Examples

This online program provides real-world learning examples to help you understand the realities of building a unicorn startup through the experiential lens of leading global brands.

Blue Apron

Premature scaling can be dangerous for a company. Discover the critical mistakes Blue Apron made during its scaling phase and how that affected its growth.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Underestimating and overestimating are both common in the startup world, but maintaining adequate resources and processes is essential to any startup's growth. Learn how Amazon Web Services (AWS) attempted to stay nimble even after becoming a large enterprise.

Casper

Most founders consider operational scalability a high-class problem — but it’s still a problem. Discover how operational scalability affected the mattress firm Casper due to inaccurate demand forecasting.

Tesla

Learn how Tesla overestimated in their plans to build a Gigafactory in 2014. While the company was capable of producing batteries for 500,000 cars, the actual car sales were 5,000.